Pitch Meeting: The Monster Mash

It’s the Halloween season, boys and ghouls! So let’s have a chat about that not-so-venerated horror tradition: the monster mash!

Going all the way back to Universal’s Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man in 1943, taking two popular horror movie monsters and putting them in the same flick, usually fighting each other, has held a strange appeal. Such films rarely work as genuine horror; the monsters were scary in the first place because they preyed upon people, not getting into brawls with each other.

Yet, King Kong vs. Godzilla? Godzilla vs. Mothra? Freddy vs. Jason? Alien vs. Predator? It’s a concept that can’t quite seem to die. They may not be scary, but damn if such movies aren’t usually a lot of fun.

So what would be your pitch for a monster mashup movie? What horror movie baddies would you like to see team up, or get into an epic tussle to see who’s the baddest of them all?

Me? I kinda want to see Chucky vs. The Evil Dead.

Both franchises have similar roots in both horror and comedy (with the comedy becoming more prevalent in each series as they continued). And with Bruce Campbell no longer reprising the role of Ash Williams, we need a new (anti-)hero who can take insane amounts of physical damage and deliver constant quips while battling demonic forces.

The setup would be pretty easy to arrange, too. Chucky is a magic practitioner (that’s how he transferred his soul into a doll, after all), so it’s not unreasonable he might seek out a copy of the Necronomicon, hoping to use it to either get himself a human body or make his doll body even more indestructible. Naturally, he ends up reading a certain incantation aloud, and unleashing an evil force that possesses the bodies of the dead (as well as trees, mirrors, hands, and a bunch of other arbitrary stuff). Throw in some human meatbags that Chucky was initially preying on, but must now team up with to fight the evil, and you’ve got yourself a gory good time.

Plus, I imagine you could get a lot of jokes out of Chucky imitating classic Ash Williams scenes, but playing out very differently on his doll’s body. Like, he has to cut off his hand when it gets possessed, but can then just take the hand off another Good Guy Doll, stick it on his stump, and be good as new. Or managing to use a chainsaw and sawed-off shotgun to fight the Evil Dead, despite those weapons being horribly oversized for him.